Judas Goat

Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates is titled after a goat with a job: “trained to live with the sheep” and lead them to human slaughter, “neck-bell jingling.” The debut’s sequences on mourning, mothers, and marriage consider the ways in which encounters with nonhuman animals reveal the deception, purchase, and stakes of human behavior.

In one poem, the reader observes “a running / boy’s essence poured into a deer’s mouth, // displacing the deer’s essence.” “Wild goats’ eyes, / when we catch them, are always open— / but this goat,” the Judas goat of the title poem, “dreams. Its lips twitch as it lies / curled chin to thurl behind the pen.” Elsewhere in the collection, animals are captured or killed by human hand or machine. In the opening poem, a pet dog is doomed by subway doors closing in “not on his neck—on the leash, trapping it” to the owner in the moving car; the poem “The Animals We Are” recalls someone “lifting the rabbit’s body from the road, lowering it into a pot.”

In “Eastern Washington Diptych,” the speaker crops a friend out of a photo with horses, “so only the animals show, with their mouths open, as if singing,” and continues, as if to explain: “[f]orgive me, I am still learning how to know when a human will improve a scene.” Across eulogies and love letters, Bates piercingly catalogs animals used as metaphor or foil, and wielded in a human economy: a snake is bled out “so it can be useful again,” while doctors own cows to write off their farmland “(buy a cow, sell a cow—keep it legit).” 

The collection also wonders about how an animal’s gaze becomes a mirror: “You won’t be the first to be disturbed by what you / find, or don’t in a bovine’s eyes.” In “Garden,” the poet observes how “Eurydice swims across the black / watery surface of a rabbit’s eye,” and in another poem, the speaker “trie[s] to run away” from a ram, its horns “hoisted before its eyes, becoming its eyes, / looking out over the ponds far below, yet to freeze.”